It took me a moment to find Eden. My bestie was hunched in a corner, rapidly flipping through some dusty old black leather tome.
“What’s up?” I sat cross-legged beside her.
She looked up at me with wide eyes and then glanced left and right, as if searching for anyone eavesdropping.
“You didn’t tell me you were royalty!” she whisper-screamed.
I winced. “I’m not. No one takes the Bane family line seriously for that.”
“You knew?” She scowled.
I nodded. “I’m sorry. Avis told me. It freaked me out, to be honest.”
I peeked at the cover of the book she was reading:Royal Bloodlines from the Three Houses.
“It was going to be for my midterm paper. I was going to talk about the founding fathers of the House of War and Bone.”
I leaned over to see her finger paused at a literal diagram of a family tree.
Bane Familyhung from one of nine branches.
“Fallon.” She lowered her voice. “You have a manor.”
My nose scrunched up. “A what?”
She reached out and grasped my gloved hand. “Fallon, your family has a permanent residence on the East Side. Bane Family Manor.”
A house? Shock ripped through me.
“Why didn’t they put my dad and I there?” Or Marissa for that matter—hadn’t Master Clarke said she was raised on the West Side by adoptive parents?
“Because apparently it’s rumored to be haunted and in disarray.” She pointed to a few lines in the book.
Holy Fae.
I had a house. I wasn’t actually considering living there, but I would have liked to have known it existed. Maybe I could go check it out. If things got hard on the West Side and we were no longer welcome in Mable’s rental, I wanted to know my options.
“They should have told me,” I said.
She nodded. “They should have. I have an address if you want to see it. It’s way up in the hills, we would need to borrow horses or something.”
I thought about it. The dance was coming up, as well as midterms, and things were going great with my dad at his job and me working with Avis. I didn’t want to throw anything else into the mix.
“Maybe…keep the address in case I ever want to check it out,” I told her, and she nodded.
“Does it say anything else interesting?”
“No,” she said too quickly and shut the book.
I rolled my eyes. “Tell me.”
“No.” She shook her head feverishly.
“Eden, come on, I’ve heard it all!” I yanked the book from her hand and started flipping through at random.
“Fine, I’ll show you.” She took the book from me and turned to the back, before handing it to me again.
When a member of the House of Ash and Shadow starts to go dark, they tend to exhibit these symptoms:
